"High gas prices are making more people than ever choose public transit"
has been a common headline these past few weeks and months, although it isn’t really true. It’s only more people than have ridden in recent memory, and even then it’s only around a 5-10% increase in ridership, and even then only about 5% of Americans use public transit. I would assume that more people would choose to take transit if there were better transit options.
This leads to the problem of needing massive investment in infrastructure, which would require a few things:
1. a permanent shift in how Americans view transit.
2. a new dedicated funding stream for transit (say a substantially increased gas tax dedicated to transit similar to how Europe operates, or some other system more palatable to Americans, and this of course assumes point 1.)
3. More cities and urban cores would need to become much denser to make light and medium rail economically feasible.
During the turn of the 20th century when Boston, New York, and Chicago built their subway systems many other smaller, but still relatively dense, cities wanted to build their own as well but costs at the time were prohibitive, and now that cities are built up I would imagine getting the right of ways for streetcars alone would make most of these projects a non-starter.
So what will be the answer? What will the price of gas have to be before Americans choose to fund transit?
If you don’t tumbl and would like to respond/comment email me and I’ll post it. matt . dudek (a) gmail . com
